It seemed almost like a page from the past. After years of reporting that Susan Rice was the perfect candidate for Secretary of State and any criticism of her was either racist, misogynistic or both, the Left wing press outlets have suddenly brought her down with a volley of personal invective.

Republicans on the Hill had basically limited their critique of Rice to her misleading statements following the Benghazi attack. Liberals, on the other hand, made it personal. Dana Milbank suggested Rice had an attitude problem. Maureen Dowd said Rice was too ambitious and unprincipled for her own good–or the country’s. Yesterday at the Daily Beast, Lloyd Grove launched a bizarre attack on Rice that accused her of having a personality disorder. The left has also been driving the less personal attacks as well. Howard French said Rice’s Africa legacy is the further empowerment of dictators. Human Rights Watch’s Tom Malinowski knocked Rice for essentially enabling atrocities in Congo.

It’s almost as if they had set out to destroy Rice in concert; with pieces aimed at each and every one of the political bailiwicks in which she might claim support. There was a remarkable sameness in the points suddenly raised against Rice by “the avalanche of leaks and criticism and personal sniping that came” out of seeming nowhere.

They include, but are not limited to charges that she was an intellectual lightweight; had sugar-coated the genocide in Rwanda to improve the political standing of her then boss, Bill Clinton; was abrasive, rude even literally flipping the bird at senior colleagues and making fun of ex-POW John McCain’s tours of conflict zones as if he were impersonating GI Joe whenever she was not picking fights with other diplomats at the UN. A total demolition of her reputation in the black community, the old guard Democrats, the Blue Dog Democrats and in the Internationalist set.

Why it’s almost as if Rice were a secret Republican. The suddenness of the turnabout was so great that a link to Ryan Lizza’s complaint that Rice “has launched a political campaign to save her reputation…before she’s even nominated” lingers like a ghost beside Lloyd Grove’s hit piece right beside it.

It was reminiscent of how those Old Bolsheviks were found out to be, after years of apparently serving the Party and Stalin faithfully, to have been secret Capitalist Roaders and Wreckers all along. Who knew? Nobody in Pravda, apparently, until they got the talking points.

It's as Richard Fernandez notices, eerily like the disappearance of multiple party people in the old Soviet Union, who had become embarrassing or otherwise inconvenient to the regime. That, in and of itself, is perhaps the most worrisome thing about this whole incident with Susan Rice. The Great Leader decides to move on and discard the troublesome servant, who otherwise provided good and faithful service, and with a simple phone call to the organs of propaganda orchestrates a perfect storm of reputation destruction. The only thing missing is the bullet to the back of the head. Let's hope Obama and his people never get to that.